


Unraveled

by JellyDishes



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Gen, epilogue to a major character death, man eudora could go for a cigarette, shooting the shit with the dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-24
Updated: 2019-10-24
Packaged: 2021-01-02 12:00:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21161312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JellyDishes/pseuds/JellyDishes
Summary: Eudora Patch has unfinished business with the Hargreeves brothers, but then again, who doesn't?





	Unraveled

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos are deeply appreciated, but please be patient with any delays for responses due to my social anxiety. Thank you in advance <333

Eudora dropped down beside Hargreeves without looking at him, hands hanging loosely between her knees. “This is what being dead looks like, then?” Her mouth twisted down and to the side as she stared out at a sunset that looked duller than usual, washed out. “Not being able to talk to anybody, let alone tell that sad sack to wipe that guilty look off his face.”

She hadn't expected an answer. She didn't get one, either, aside from a choked noise she didn't turn around to see. “Not that he’d listen to me even if he could,” she added with a humorless huff of a laugh. He was stubborn, in that way that got under her skin and stayed there that she'd never really minded. It was familiar, too, sometimes in a way she did mind. “Work long enough on the beat, you'll see enough kids -adults, too- wearing his face. Weathered, you know? Older than they ought to be. You've got it, too.” She finally looked behind her at the man whose life she'd saved. 

He was somehow thinner than she remembered, old, as she'd said. Drawn and haggard and  _ tired _ . “This is what your death looks like,” he said in answer to her own earlier question. “Others look…”

“Less full of holes?” She spread her arms wide, which opened her jacket wide to showcase the ragged red tear through the layers of her. Then she let them drop. “Don't.”

Klaus’ own guilty expression shifted. “Don't what?” He asked slowly, almost what you could call suspiciously. Good. 

"This is the part where you tell me that you'll look after him for me and I float off to the afterlife on the wings of two chubby babies, right?” She snorted. “Well, don’t. I can't even trust Diego to take care of Diego.”

“Nothing’s ever that easy,” was his answer, and she supposed it wasn't. “Unfinished business doesn't stop weighing you down just because you're dead, even when and if it does get finished. Then there's  _ guilt _ .” He gave a (hah) ghost of a smile, and turned his head to follow the path of her original gaze and at the splash of the setting sun. “You should've done it sooner, or better, or just  _ known _ what to say or do or think. But you can't. No one can, not even us.”

She wondered what he saw in that sunset. Was it gold and cream like on the day she'd met Diego, or the vivid colors of a bruise? “Try telling your brother that. He tortures himself better than anyone I've ever known, and I've met actual torturers.” There was a joke there, one that involved leather and unexplained late night disappearances, but neither one of them was in any mood to make it. “And…” She bit the inside of her cheek, except she wasn't, because it wasn't there anymore. And wasn't  _ that _ a brain teaser. “I can't just leave him to do it alone.”

“You can die for other people,” Klaus told her heavily, “but you can't live for them.”

“...That was almost poignant,” Eudora admitted after a few long moments spent rolling those words around her lack of a tongue. 

He laughed again, a bit more honestly. “Thank the ninja turtles. Leonardo knows what he's talking about.”

Eudora couldn't help a smile.“And which words really belong to you?”

Klaus Hargreeves’ smile slipped sideways off his face in answer to the rise of hers. “Not a whole lot. Too many people sliding through my head to really know which thoughts’re filtered through, y’know…” he waved a hand. “All that gauzy crap. Ectoplasm, if you're fancy.”

She wasn't. “I'm not.” There came a pause as she looked at him,  _ really  _ looked at him. Something like pity had her reach out a hand that couldn't provide any warmth at all, of any kind. He looked away when she said, “And what is my gauze telling you?”

He kept his eyes locked on the fading light as it dripped between the buildings. "That you're a fan of pancakes, but could go for waffles.”

She looked at him for a small eternity locked within a few seconds, and then she nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “Right on the money.”


End file.
